The Gift Kitchen
Our kitchen was a bustling place this week! I absolutely love giving gifts of food! I love the process of planning what I’m going to make. I love the actual making of it. And I really love the packaging and making everything look nicely presentable. This year, we gave gifts of four different types of jams: Blueberry Spoon Fruit, Apple Thyme Butter, Pomegranate Raspberry Thyme Jam, and Winter Spice Jelly. (Just click on any of those names to go to the recipes. I used an online converter to convert metric measurements to English. And I eliminated the star anise from the Winter Spice Jelly recipe.) This year, I really wanted to give people a little taste of New Hampshire, so to the greatest extent possible, I used ingredients found locally…blueberries I picked myself, raspberries Max and I picked, apples from a local farm, maple syrup from our town’s award-winning syrup producer, and thyme we grew ourselves. I also did a lot of experimenting with making jams without pectin this year, in order to achieve a fresher and more flavorful jam, and I was really pleased with most of the results.
The kitchen island was completely taken over by the packaging process. Each jar was covered with a scrap of linen, tied round with twine, and a homemade tag was attached.
I love how the Winter Spice Jelly sparkled in the late afternoon sunshine.